


i am the sand at the bottom half of the hourglass

by withthekeyisking



Series: Magical Scribblings [2]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Batfam Week, Batfam Week 2020, Batfamily (DCU), Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Explosions, Gen, Human Bruce Wayne, Injury, Magical Dick Grayson, Magical Jason Todd, Magical Tim Drake, Young Dick Grayson, injured child
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-22 14:17:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22717381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withthekeyisking/pseuds/withthekeyisking
Summary: Bruce has a rule about metas in Gotham.Faced with his new ward developing magical abilities, he's going to have to skew his rule a little.(AKA how the Bat of Gotham ended up with three magical children)
Series: Magical Scribblings [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1475876
Comments: 49
Kudos: 444
Collections: Tales from the Cave





	i am the sand at the bottom half of the hourglass

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Immortals_ by Fall Out Boy
> 
> Day 6: Fluff | Take Your Child to Work Day | **Magic/Fantasy AU**
> 
> Part of my _Magical Scribblings_ series!

There's something going on with Dick.

Bruce doesn't pay it any attention at first; he's new to parenting, after all, and any oddities could be easily attributed to the fact that Dick just lost his parents and with them the only world he's ever known. That was bound to have some growing pains, a period of rough adjustment, and Dick's an eccentric kid all on his own, a sharp contrast to how controlled Bruce tends to be.

But it's been eight months now, and Bruce can't deny that there's something going on with the child in his care.

At least twice a month, Bruce gets a phone call from Dick's school informing him that the boy needs to be picked up, that he's having some type of episode. He'll arrive and find the Dick curled up in the nurse's office, eyes screwed shut, hands slammed over his ears. Extremely oversensitive to sound and light, apparently. To a debilitating level.

Bruce takes him to doctors, trying to find the cause of these episodes, but neurologically, there's nothing. One doctor suggests that it might be a psychosomatic response to the change in environment, how different Gotham is from the circus, but there's something about the way Dick won't meet his eyes that says there is something else going on.

Then there's how intuitive Dick is, how sometimes he'll simply know exactly what Bruce or Alfred are feeling, and respond accordingly.

And then there are the...flashes. The things that Bruce—when he sees them—can easily attribute to his lack of sleep, or having had a long day, or just tricks of the light. But he can't deny the shimmer in the air around Dick sometimes, the flashes of _something_ forming before it vanishes into nothing. And how one of Dick's episodes tends to follow it.

Bruce doesn't understand what it is, what's happening with _his kid._ And Dick won't talk to him, won't tell him what's going on. It makes Bruce...concerned. _Afraid._ He can't fix it if he doesn't know what's broken.

Everything comes to a head one night during patrol, eleven months after Dick came to live with him at the Manor. They're staking out a warehouse down by the docks—and if Bruce had a penny for every time he did that, he'd be a...well, he’s already rich, but you get the point—waiting to see if a lead about a weapons deal going down is actually true.

After two and a half hours of watching and seeing nothing—next to a ten-year-old who is getting more fidgety and restless by the second—Bruce is ready to let it go; it was a fifty-fifty shot anyway, not definite, and things don’t always pan out.

Dick looks relieved to be leaving, though he's making a valiant attempt to pretend that he has no strong feelings about it one way or the other. Bruce has to suppress a fond smile; his kid is an overactive talker, and yet he managed to primarily focus on the boring task of _watching_ an empty place for two and a half hours, simply because it was part of the mission. Bruce will have to remind himself to schedule some non-training time between them, reinforce in Dick's mind that there's more binding them together than what he can do as Robin.

They've barely stepped away from the ledge of the roof they're on when Bruce hears a click and a beep from beneath them. He looks sharply to Dick, the boy a few steps ahead of him and already in the center of the roof, but doesn't have time to call out a warning before there's the rumble of a controlled explosion, and the roof caves in under their feet.

Bruce shoots out a line immediately, years of training making the reaction instant, and feels his fall jerk to a stop as the line connects with the next building over, leaving him hanging over the crater.

But he doesn't see Dick.

"Robin!" he barks out, eyes scanning the rubble beneath him, desperate for any sign of the boy. He flicks the switch on the grapple, lowering himself safely to the ground, and walks carefully over the broken pieces of concrete and brick, searching for _any sign_ of his boy.

"Robin!" he says again, only silence meeting his call. He makes his way to where the center of the roof would've been and kneels down amongst the rubble, heart clenching in his chest.

And then he begins to dig.

Piece by piece he shifts the crumbled roof outward, working to keep himself calm, to remind himself that silence doesn't mean death, that Dick is probably just unconscious and everything is going to be _fine._ His kid is going to be _fine._

When he moves a large piece of concrete and sees a boot-covered foot, he takes a deep breath and works faster, unburying Dick and pulling him up into his arms, looking him over for the worst of the injuries by habit.

He is indeed unconscious, with blood flowing sluggishly from a gash across his forehead. His arm is bent at an angle that certainly says broken, and one of his calves is impaled by a pole of rebar, which is going to hurt like a bitch to remove. Bruises are already beginning to form, coating almost all visible skin in violent blue and purples, but he's breathing and his heart's pumping—he's _alive,_ he's going to be just fine, and the relief that brings is heavenly.

Dick shifts in his arms, making a pained noise, and his face scrunches up before he blinks his eyes open, looking blearily up at Bruce, blue eyes clouded over. A concussion is very likely.

"B?" Dick asks, a slur in his voice, looking up at his partner in confusion. "Where're...?" He glances around, still looking confused.

"You're alright," Bruce tells him softly. He glances at the rebar, pursing his lips; he has sedatives in his belt—might be best to knock Dick out before removing it. Though combining sedatives with a concussion is never a good idea. "Someone blew the roof, you got caught in it, but you’re going to be just fine. Okay?"

Dick nods, but still looks like he only half understands where they are and what's going on. But that's okay; Bruce will get them out of here and treat Dick's injuries, and the boy will be okay. He's going to be _perfectly fine._

"Why's y'r m'nd s'fast?" Dick asks, brow furrowing. It takes Bruce a moment to decipher to slurred speech, and then he's simply...confused. His mind is fast? Is Dick's concussion worse than he thought, and he’s confusing _'mind'_ for _‘pulse'?_ Because Bruce's pulse is certainly faster than usual at the moment.

"What do you mean?" he asks, and then shifts to examine Dick's calf. The rebar isn't all the way through, which is certainly good; less damage, and less painful to remove.

"Y'r m'nd," Dick repeats, staring at Bruce's forehead. "B'zzin' so...fast. Usu'lly so _steady."_ He shakes his head, and then makes a sound of pain at the motion. "Y'fraid?" Then he nods, as if answering his own question. "'fraid. 'S'okay, B. 'M...okay."

Then his eyes close and he falls limp in Bruce’s arms. Bruce's hand darts up to his neck, searching for a pulse, and finds it still there. Slow, sure, but still there.

"Okay, Robin," Bruce says softly, and wraps his hand around the rebar sticking out of Dick’s leg. "We're almost home."

* * *

As Bruce sits at the batcomputer (so named by the excitable child in his care) trying to find the person responsible for blowing the roof, he keeps one ear on Dick's heartrate monitor, the information pulled up on the screen next to him.

Getting back to the batcave had been stressful, but the boy's going to be perfectly alright, after a lot of rest and taking it easy—which is truly neither of their strong suits. They'll check how bad the concussion really is in the morning, but for now they let him sleep. Bruce is content to leave him be, knowing his son is alright.

But even as he searches for the bomber, Bruce's thoughts keep drifting back to what Dick said about his mind being _fast._ It could've easily been the ramblings of a concussed child, but Bruce hasn't gotten this far in life by so easily dismissing things like this. There are just too many things about Dick that Bruce doesn't understand. Too many things that don't add up.

He locates the bomber, and creates a program to keep track of the man, because he's not leaving the cave again tonight. He's not leaving Dick, not when he looks so small and injured and vulnerable. No, he's needed here now. Catching the bomber can wait until tomorrow.

When he hears a small groan from behind him, Bruce gets to his feet, moving over to Dick's bedside. His son shifts, face scrunching up, and then slowly blinks his eyes open, looking hazily up at Bruce.

"Hey, chum," Bruce says softly, brushing Dick's hair back from his forehead. "How are you feeling?"

"M'head hurts," Dick mumbles. "What happened?"

"The roof got blown," Bruce reminds him. "But you're going to be just fine, with a little rest and recuperation."

Dick smiles a little dopily. "'Course I will," he says. "We're survivors. I'll get better, and then you'll slow down again."

Bruce purses his lips at the reminder of what Dick said back in the rubble, how his mind was _fast._ He's saying it again, and it doesn't make any more sense now than it did then.

"What do you mean by that, Dick?" Bruce asks. "About my mind being fast? What does that mean?"

Dick freezes, silly smile fading from his face. He looks anxious for some reason, shifting away from Bruce, and the man has to ignore how that motion from his son hurts. Blue eyes look away from him, flicking around the cave and just about everywhere except at Bruce.

"Dick?"

"Please don't be mad at me," Dick says, voice wobbly. His eyes look like they're getting wet. "Please don't kick me out, I'm sorry—"

"Woah, hey," Bruce rushes to interrupt, not understanding where this is coming from. "Kick you out? Dick, no, never, this is your home. Whatever's going on, we can fix it together. Okay?"

"But you hate metas," Dick says, beginning to cry.

Bruce blinks. And blinks again. And suddenly a lot of things about his ward make sense.

"Oh, Dickie," Bruce sighs. He puts his hand on Dick's head again, stroking soothingly through the black locks. "You're my kid, okay? And that's not ever going to change. Regular human or meta or alien from space, that's _never_ going to change." Dick looks up at him, hope creeping hesitantly into his expression. "The Manor is your home, and will be for as long as you want it."

"Even if I have powers?" Dick asks, sounding small.

"Even if you have powers," Bruce confirms. "Which are what, by the way?"

Dick jerks a shoulder in something of a shrug. "It's all so confusing, I dunno. I can— _feel_ people's minds around me, and sometimes it gets to be too much and it's overwhelming and scary."

"The episodes at school," Bruce realizes. It seems like Dick's never really been trained to control his abilities, and lack of control paired with mind reading can have disastrous effects for the telepath. "Can you hear thoughts?"

Dick shakes his head. "No, not like that. I can just—feel you." His face scrunches up in distress. "I don't know how to explain. It's just—you're there, I can feel you there. Your mind is so...steady. This low buzz, you know? The more I know somebody, the easier it is to feel you, and I can—kind of sense your emotion by the way your mind changes. Like...like frequencies changing, almost."

"There's something else, though," Bruce says, recalling the shimmer in the air from time to time, like something that's not supposed to be there.

Dick grimaces, shifting.

"It's okay," Bruce says softly. "I promise, I'm not angry. I just want to figure this out with you."

The boy nods hesitantly. "I don't know what it is, but sometimes I imagine things, and for second it seems to start to be real. But it's gone as soon as it comes. And then I get a really bad headache for a while after."

Bruce makes a mental note to call Zatanna after Dick's gone to sleep to get her opinion on all of this. He has to call the school in the morning, too, to excuse Dick from classes for the day. And maybe they can spend some more time together, working out the specifics of just what it is Dick can do.

Christ, he has a meta son. Certainly didn't see that coming. But it's no different than any other skill, really. It's just one more thing for Dick to master, one more possible tool.

Yes, it's very true that Bruce doesn't like metahumans in Gotham. He thinks they bring more trouble than they're worth, escalating the issues that are already bad enough. But this is his boy, his sweet Robin, and there's not a single chance he would ever do anything to make Dick feel unwelcome in his home. The boy just lost his mother and father; he isn't going to lose Bruce and Alfred, too.

"Get some rest, Dick," Bruce says, reaching forward to squeeze Dick's hand. "We'll talk more in the morning, okay?"

Dick nods. "You're really not mad at me?"

Bruce shakes his head. "Not even slightly."

Dick offers him a hesitant—but real—smile, and snuggles back into the bed. "Night, B."

"Goodnight, chum," Bruce replies, and heads back over to the computer; he's got some research to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The only reason all three origins aren't being posted at the same time is because I am running on about 2 hours of sleep and can't find the other two bits! Are they in my Word Docs? My Google Docs? My _other_ Google Docs? The notes app on my phone? Do they even exist at all or are they a construct of my sleep-deprived brain? Who knows, certainly not me. Whenever they're located, they'll be posted.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! Tomorrow's the last day of Batfam Week, my dudes! (and my birthday! 🎉)


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